regards
by ironoc
Summary: It's scary, really, how quickly the human race can descend into madness.
1. Chapter 1

It's scary, really, how quickly the human race can descend into madness.

Dusk is just beginning to creep over Sollux Captor's shoulders as he picks his was through the rubble back to the relatively exposed and dingy shack that he has erected in the outskirts of the city; which is now nothing more than a shell. All windows are either broken or simply not there anymore, their glass collected on the floor in puddles of crystalline shards that will glint in the small amount of sunlight that manages to peek through. The ash that rose from the fires and earthquakes is caked onto the sky like mud. With no sigh of anyone, much less anyone he knows, he has slipped into hiding.

The initial drop was the worst. Earthquakes, lots of them, followed by fires and storms and cannibals as the aftermath. People went mad, isolated themselves, and they're often seen loitering around corners in groups of savages which are, much like everyone else, not much more than skin and bone and had a colour closer than anything else to the tone of greying, flaking plaster. They're known to strip passers-by of everything they own - even, in more extreme cases, their flesh. When it's the end of the world, after all, food is food, and if you can get your mitts on it then it's better than nothing.

Things got desperate very, very quickly.

Of course, not everyone is completely out of their minds. The few sane humans left tried - and still are trying - their hardest to set up first aid tents and trading points and transport services with the few supplies that they have left. Unfortunately, the cannibals are quick to sniff out these places, and so they become more and more few and far between as they are ravaged and stormed by the groups.

Sollux hasn't seen much.

After allowing himself a few days to recover from the beginning (or the end, as that was a more suitable description) of it all, he ventured out into the city. Honestly, he hadn't known what he had expected to see there, but he didn't like it either way. At all.

It is a ghost town, in short.

The ground is melted, glazed and scorched and still smouldering in places - small orange-red flames trying desperately to cling to life and breathe what little oxygen there was left that hadn't already been greedily claimed by humans. It was days before he saw another person, and weeks before he saw a live one. And even they wouldn't be alive for long, he could tell. You learn to know those kinds of things at the end of the world.

It's funny to think that he used to be the boy that was the strongest and the weakest all at once, the one who hid all of his imperfections and upset behind a visor of curtness and hatred, but was now that guy who cried once when it all crumbled and vowed never to do so again.

Sollux has lost his friends.

Every last one of them.

Or he assumes so, at least, because that's the safest thing to do. Hope often ends in despair, he's learned. But uncertainty is the worst thing; he hasn't actually seen anyone die, and the biggest clue that he has ever found is a pair of glasses that look like they could have once belonged to Eridan.

So maybe saying that they were simply lost was the best thing.

The first conversation Sollux has in weeks is with a rather panicked blur of a woman, dashing around and demanding that he tell her where her children (her sweet little angels, her precious gems, where could they have gotten to-) are. Of course, he doesn't know - he isn't sure how he could. Even without the woman's bandanna covering at least half of her face, her skin is probably still streaked with dust and blood and god knows what else and it would be very difficult to detect a family resemblance even if he had seen any children. After a few minutes of her thoughtless shrieking, he manages to break away, and retreats back home.

Five days later, he finds her lying, curled up, dead, the fragile and slightly more grey and decomposed bodies of two children next to her. Once he is home, he cries for the first time.

The world has become all too sad, all too quickly. Scary, too. Sollux cries more from the loss of hope, the loss of all of the other humans, the humans who are just like him, than he does from his own fear. His own stupid, selfish fright.

We all have it, don't we? Those times when we find our hearts stricken with fear by something that doesn't affect us, or at least doesn't affect us as badly. Something that we have seen end people and break people, something more terrible than any measure of how scared we are. Sollux often thought of the apocalypse of something alive, something with arms that envelope the world with ash and lungs that send it storming once it reaches the ground, blood that boils them all, stirs them up. He imagined it with ram's horns, thick and grand and curling, just like on the animals she had loved so much.

Once, in the throes of one of his deepest hopelessnesses, he might have called it Aradia.

God, does he miss Aradia.

He misses her messy, thick auburn hair, the way strands of it would get in her face and she'd blow them out of the way with an impatient pout. He misses how she would always speak with her hands, especially when speaking of her many passions, of the paranormal and of ruins and of what happens after life. He misses her voice, her soft, almost whispery voice, the way her lips brushed against his ear-

More than anyone else, he thinks of her. More than anything, he wonders if she's okay. It's one of the only specks of hope he has left.

It would be ironic if someone so fascinated by the end of the world had died by it.

She isn't the only one, though. He thinks of Feferi, he thinks of Karkat and Rose and Tavros and Vriska; even, sometimes, of Eridan - he wonders if they're okay, too, if they managed to pull through it all as well as he had (it was all fluke, of course, every last bit of it).

But he doubts it.

Eridan, strangely, had been the last familiar face he had seen - only minutes before the first earthquake. They had had one of their little age-old spats at the side of the road, Sollux smugly coming out for the better (and Eridan now sporting a nice black eye) before picking his way home - only, you'll know by now, he didn't quite get that far. Beggars can't be choosers, he knows, but he isn't content with the last face in his mind being Eridan's fury-contorted expression as he walked away.

Sollux slams the door to the shack closed behind him, slugging his pack against the wall and falling into the rickety chair into the corner with an exhausted sigh, the kind that is on the brink of unspoken words. He is almost completely encased by the prospect of sleep when there is a knock at the door, on the window frame, on the wall.

And he realises that someone followed him home.

His first feeling is not one of fear, but of determination. After living this long through the worst of it, he isn't about to die in the aftermath at the hands of whatever psycho is loitering at the door. Another knock - Sollux jumps to his feet. With a serene kind of calmness, he picks up the old rusty axe he has propped up against the wall (the only weapon of any kind that he could get his hands on) and grips it firmly in both of his fists, the bruised, withering wood pressing splinters into the calloused flesh of his palms.

"Who's there?"

No response. Just a grunt and another bang, further away. It isn't a knock, Sollux can tell - more of a frustrated kick to the ground. "Let me in, will you?" comes an annoyed-sounding voice, laced heavily with a Southern accent. Texan, Sollux thinks, and very coherent.

Tentatively, he approaches the door.

"Who are you?" he calls, trying not to let his voice waver. Raising the axe with one hand, he places the other on the tarnished doorknob, resting it there, hesitant to turn it. It rattles in the wind outside.

When the voice comes again, it's closer. "A friend. Not one of those goddamn cannibals. You're safe, just open the door, or I swear-"

"What?" Sollux cuts him off, his grip on the handle tightening. "What will you do?"

There's a few minutes of eerie, unsettled silence. Sollux can hear his heart thumping against his ribs, encased in the quiet, waiting for something to happen. It doesn't - not for a while. No noise from outside but the wind, no noise from inside but Sollux's shaky, stilted breathing-

And then the catastrophic sound of glass breaking and wood splintering and crashing upon the floor. Hard-wearing, rubber-soled boots collide with the damp wood with a low clunk, and Sollux presses his back against the equally mildew-ridden wall, terrified. The other's breathing is ragged, almost laboured, as if the effort of entering through the window was simply too great.

Realising that he has been paying too much attention to the newcomer's entry and not enough to his face, Sollux turns his gaze a few degrees upwards-

-and meets a very familiar pair of aviator sunglasses.


	2. Chapter 2

Sollux doesn't know what he had expected.

The intruder in front oh him sways for a bit, unsteady on his steadily-set feet, and even though he isn't smiling or reaching out to Sollux or anything of the light, the survivor knows that he isn't the enemy. It may just be the mouth-shaped rips in his sleeves, made most likely by the lurking savages, or the fact that he hasn't attacked yet.

Maybe he's just waiting for the right moment. All of the rogues may be insane, but not all of them are brain dead. That's just because they're the ones Sollux always saw out in daylight; almost like zombies with their gaping mouths and flaking skin and very close to empty eyes. So if this boy is one of them, then he's clearly not too far gone.

Which is at least a bit of hope in the dark.

Sollux thinks back to the newcomer's voice, the loud, broken accent of his - spoken almost as if he isn't used to speaking with it. When it hits him, it does so in chunks; not all at once, almost like killing someone with tiny nicks in their skin and not a fatal wound. He's tired and majorly unresponsive, but he manages to squint through the scratched, dusty glass of the other's glasses to see eyes - red eyes. Redder and brighter than the dried, cracked riverbed of blood that runs down the side of his face, redder even than the fresh puddles Sollux has encountered in the cities that glisten and congeal in the ashen sunlight.

The boy blinks, and Sollux is the first to speak. His voice is cracked from fear and surprise and lack of use.

"Strider?"

He barely even reacts.

Sollux hasn't been thinking of Dave Strider much in his lonely delirium - or any of the other three at all, really. As interesting as the boy always thought he was, Sollux digressed; often to the point of them clashing viciously in the way that he always had with Eridan. But Strider was always calmer and overall less volatile than Eridan, and less liable to show himself up in the way that Ampora did. That, however, wasn't to say that he never showed himself up. Rose had told them all of times that Dave had made a fool of himself; and Sollux made a habit of bringing that up whenever the 'cool kid' had tried to act smooth.

"Dave Strider?"

Dave twitches slightly, before shuffling his feet and standing in a way that seems more natural, his hands in the large pockets of his moth-eaten jacket. Still trying to act smooth, then, Sollux thinks; and is almost grateful of that. At least some things have stayed the same.

"Yeah." Sollux expects some sort of snide remark about how much of an apparent genius he is and how his hacker brain should've been able to figure that out sooner, but it doesn't come. "I thought I was the last one," Dave mumbles, looking away.

Sollux tries his hardest to not feel sorry for him. After all. they're in pretty much the same situation, and pity would be pointless now. Pity doesn't put the world back together. Pity, Sollux has decided, is what puts all of the dead bodies on the ground in the scorched city streets.

"Well you're not," Sollux snaps, maybe a little more harshly than he had wanted; but he doesn't want to take it back in any way. There's a silence, curling between them like smoke, awkward and scratched like the records of Dave's that Sollux had gotten his hands on. A part of the boy - who is still clutching the axe closely in both hands - wonders if Dave blames him for that. Hopefully he does.

All of a sudden, Sollux is struck with the burden or having even more hope than before, and he comes close to asking Dave something ridiculous. If he's here, after all, then Aradia might still be-

!I need you to come with me," the blond boy cuts in suddenly. Sollux is surprised and more than a little bit annoyed at the interruption, but he decides to roll with it and keep his cool.

"Why me?" It's a perfectly valid question. Sollux is sure that he's the last person on Earth that Dave would be willing to trek around with - and yet, he's here, in all his dickish glory. A soft, bitter laugh rattles through the shack like a rough wind.

"Trust me, it wouldn't have been you if I had a choice." With that, Sollux's suspicions are validated. "If we meet someone both sane and less insufferable than you, you'll be ditched in the gutters without a second thought, capice?"

Sollux can't help the anger that begins to stir and bubble in the pit of his stomach at hearing that. "Is that so?" he asks coolly. "What would be my motive to follow you, then, O Majestic Strider?"

"I can help you find them."

With that, Sollux freezes. The irritation gently simmers away - all he heard was 'I can help you find her' and suddenly all of his petty dislike seems irrelevant and small. And he's just that close to shaking Dave's gloves hand and closing the deal, locking it tight, just because of Aradia, but he hesitates, his throat dry. The things I'd do for love, he thinks.

Obviously his silence is taken for disinterest because the Texan tilts his chin upwards and comes out with an impatient, "Well?"

Sollux tentatively shoves his hand into the space between them, not making eye contact. "Let's just get this straight. You're a piece of shit and I hate you."

Dave gives one of his trademark infuriating white-rapper smirks. He knows he's won. "Damn straight. It's completely mutual, my dear sweet tight-ass bitch." Dave's suddenly familiar demeanor seems forced. Distantly, he's upset as anyone else would be - Sollux can only very vaguely tell.

The walls of the shack creak lethargically as the wind picks up outside. Dave seems to snap out of something, then, and fixes Sollux with a sober, meaningful stare. "We leave tomorrow. In the morning."

Trying not to seem shocked (not by the suddenness, but the fact that Dave seems like a very ready and experienced person and that Sollux had expected him to announce that they would be leaving straight away) Sollux nods, finally lowering the heavy weapon as he notices how tired his arms have grown in the short space of time.

"Be ready by sunrise," Dave mutters, before turning and moving over to the corner of the room, sitting down with his back pressed flush against the wall. There's something in his hand, and it's hard for Sollux to squint through the darkness at it without being suspected of something. After a while of hopeful wondering, his questions are answered. Dave is holding a sturdy-looking but worn and tarnished headband. It's violet in colour, Sollux realises after a little bit longer.

And then he knows that Dave Strider isn't looking for them either.

Dave Strider just wants to see his sister again.


	3. Chapter 3

The way the sun rises is almost rude, intrusive. Sollux sends it a thousand grudging curses as the grey light filters through the broken window, brighter than usual due to the absence of the dust on the glass. Beneath the sill, he imagines Dave to still be sleeping, bent over with one hand in his lap and the other with the fingers curled around that headband, his glasses still on his face, hiding his closed eyes.

But strangely, he is not. Sollux takes a good while to sit up, feeling understandably damp and achy from a night of slumber on the rotten ground, and his eyes dart over to the other side of the room and meet wood paneling, not a sleeping teen. In his still half-sleeping confusion, Sollux blinks for a while at the empty space, before standing up, flexing his shoulders.

"Strider?"

It's obvious that the coolkid isn't here, and Sollux is frustrated more by his have-been than anything. He pulls his torn jacket closer around his bony frame, shivering as he bitterly notices the still-gaping hole in the wall where the window used to be. He's currently too annoyed to even care about Dave's motives. There wasn't much to even think on, anyway; if someone enters your property and then is gone by the time that you wake up, nothing is much to left to the imagination. Sollux will investigate his belongings later - he expects theft, of course. Despite Dave's apparent good intentions of the night before, Sollux still doesn't trust him as far as he can throw him.

"Strider?" he calls again, expecting no response. He presses his back against the wall with another silent curse, directed at himself, more than anything, for being so foolish. Rubbing his eyes beneath his glasses, he drags his feet over to the east wall, where he usually dumps his belongings.

When he opens his eyes, he is surprised.

Not only is his own rucksack there, but Dave's is too, leaning against the other like a tired friend. Sollux blinks, crouching down to look at it, wrinkling his nose. It's not exactly the strangest thing that's happened, but it's close. Glancing back at the broken window, Sollux begins to feel the thing that he always dreaded the most.

Concern.

Dave Strider is the last person he thought he would feel it for, but here it is, and Dave is most certainly gone. Maybe the worry is completely selfish, however. Sollux is so hopeful to see Aradia again, and maybe Dave was his only hope, or maybe not. Either way, his guide is inexplicably missing and without his belongings, too.

Sollux kicks the wall.

He knew that hope was pointless, and he himself is hopeless for believing in it in the first place.

After a few moment spent moping in his frustrated, self pitying stupor, Sollux shrugs Dave's pack over one shoulder and nudges the door open with his toe, preparing to go and look for whatever might be left of the kid. If he was caught unawares by one of the more desperate kind of rogue, then he's done for. He would have been dinner within minutes, and only his bones would be left - and even those would be used for crafting tools. There wouldn't be a trace left of him.

Regretfully, Sollux traipses towards the city, remembering the mother lying curled up with her children and how she was apparently still in one piece. She's one of the respected, that's what he always thinks. She was lucky enough to be left in one piece after death, despite her and the other bodies nestled with her constituting quite the feast for any hungry cannibal.

Often, he will wonder how long it takes for him to get that desperate, too.

It's clear when he starts to near the city limits - the bare ground starts on a gradient into crumbling concrete, dusty and exposed and kind of sad looking in many ways. Sollux doesn't like to think about how poetic it all almost looks, how eerily beautiful. He doesn't like to think about how Aradia would be having a field day if she saw all of this, if she lived amongst it.

He does, however, like to think about how she still might be living amongst it.

While hope is helpless, it's certainly helped him get by.

At the first building he comes to, he outstretches his arm, trailing his fingers along the rough, scorched brick, feeling every dent, every nook and cranny, trying his hardest to distract his mind from what he might be about to see. But when he casts an eye over the ground and across the gaping windows of the derelict buildings, he finds the area to be empty, the occasional wind ghosting through the gaps and creating a lonely whistling sound on the panelling of some of the buildings. Shrugging to himself, he continues, shuffling through the streets with his eyes to the ground.

"Sollux?"

Sollux whips around. The voice came from behind him, and it certainly wasn't Dave's - much too feminine, even Sollux would admit that. If he was any less alert than he is now, he might have suspected that it's Aradia.

But it's not, surely. He knows the world doesn't work that way.

His movements slow, he begins to creep towards the window frame. He can't see anything past the few triangles of glass that remain embedded in the frame, and squints his eyes so that he might just be able to see into the gloom. It yields no result, however, as when he is even merely a foot away he still can't see shit.

"Oh, Sollux!"

Sollux freezes, blinking, his grip on the strap of the pack tightening with fear (although he'd never admit to it). The voice doesn't sound right, not at all - too breathy, whispery, too sing-songy - but the strange nagging feeling is pushed to the back of his mind as curiosity and enthusiasm overtake it. Gently, he places one hand on the frame, ducking his head inside. A foolish action, even he knows that, but the person beyond the window definitely knows him and he can't afford to lose them now.

And then a growl.

Quiet, high, but a growl, wavering through the dark. Sollux thinks to retreat, and quickly, but his heart is suddenly struck with realisation and he smiles instead.

"Nepeta?"

Nothing.

"Nepeta, is that you?"

Sollux listens to his voice echo vaguely through the space, watching diligently for any signs of movement. And then he hears it. The soft whooshing of fabric brushing up against the brick, the dull thuds of footfalls as whoever is behind the wall - and god, does Sollux hope with all of his being that it's Nepeta - approaches the window again.

"Sollux!"

He barely gets a look at the owner of the rather shrill voice before she pounces through the window, her toned arms holding him down into the ground when they get there. Nepeta's tongue is hanging out of the side of her mouth in her excitement, and-

Oh god, did she just lick him?

"Oh, Sollux! I am so glad to see you! It's been such a long time-"

Another lick, more intimate this time. Sollux is verging on uncomfortable.

"Sollux, you taste delicious."

Oh shit.


	4. Chapter 4

Sollux realises that something is wrong as soon as she says that. No, he realised when she started licking him, really. Sure, it's Nepeta, but she almost seems a little too enthusiastic in her actions. Alarm bells ring in his head but he is frozen, stuck fast to the ground as the girl trails her tongue across his cheek again. Her nails dig into his wrists with enough force to draw blood, and surely enough he soon feels a warm wetness trickle across his skin.

Slowly, Nepeta raises one hand to her lips, licking the scarlet liquid off.

But Sollux refuses to believe that she's one of them. She seems too calm, too sane; there is no crazed glint in her eyes like there usually is with cannibals. She's just like the old Nepeta, the one that he remembers best.

Strangely, he is not afraid, Not even as there is the flash of a knife in the sunlight (or is it a gun? He can't tell - all that he knows is that it's definitely metal and probably an imminent threat).

She holds it up. Sollux doen't dare look. He can feel the pulse in her thumb galloping in anticipation, and he's not looking at her face but there is no doubt within him that she still has that crazed grin plastered onto her lips.

"I'm sure you'll make a delicious meal, Sollux!"

Sollux tenses up in shock and sudden fear as he hears a gunshot. But it's odd, he thinks, because he can't feel any pain - but maybe she's aimed at his head, put the bullet in his temple, and maybe death was immediate. That's what they always say, isn't it; that sometimes you can die without even knowing that you're dead.

So maybe Sollux is already dead. He's oddly okay with that.

All too quickly he is dragged mercilessly out of his thoughts when a weight drops upon him.

That weight is Nepeta's body.

Nepeta's dead and rapidly cooling body.

Sollux raises his head, struggling helplessly between the lifeless girl, trying to find the source of the noise -

He stops moving when he sees the barrel of a gun peeking through the broken window, only the very tip barely visible in the dark. Heart in his throat, he moves his arms, pulling his wrists out of Nepeta's loosely curled hands and rolling her off of him, wincing at the blood already beginning to congeal on the side of her head.

"Hello?" he finds himself calling again. Even if this person is his saviour, it is still worth being wary of them - Sollux, after all, is unarmed, and they are holding a gun.

Tentatively,he shuffles back, coughing and pulling his scarf back up over his mouth - it had fallen down when Nepeta pounced on him. His throat feels raw and scratchy already from the exposure to the dust-infected air. He's seen people cough and hack themselves to death because they did not take the precautiouns necessary to protect themselves from the dangerous, contaminated atmosphere.

He wants to call out again, but finds his throat to be even drier than before. It might be fright, but he's not sure. He's not afraid of dying, really, but of abandoning his search for the others. His search so far has gone terribly; Nepeta is gone, a bullet in her head, and he figures it's safe to assume that Dave is dead, too.

And now Sollux is on the wrong end of a gun.

A footstep. A forced, uneven breath, almost a sigh. The gun's holder can be seen now, a greyish, static shadow in the opening. They shuffle.

The end of the gun is lowered ever so slightly, and Sollux hears a voice.

"Are you okay?"

The person sounds caught between genuine concern and various attempts at keeping their voice cool and even. Maybe they're not too bed, Sollux thinks as he notices the tremors in their tone, fear like an earthquake. Drawing his legs up to his chest, he remains silent, not even nodding or shaking his head as he keeps his eyes warily locked on the form. They seem upset, almost traumatised that they have just killed someone, even if she was one of the rogues.

Sollux blinks as his mind clears enough to let him catch on to the fact that he's heard this voice, detached and faceless, before. A suspected enemy outside of his own little rotten wooden shack, impatient kicking at the base of the door.

He isn't sure whether to be angry or relieved. Spinning the pack around him so that it is sitting on his chest, he holds it close, his eyes wide.

He waits.

Nothing comes of his anticipation, for a long time. He can still see the gun, shaking more than it was before, and he might have, one or two times, seen the sun reflect off of a pair of reflective aviator sunglasses, and-

He inhales, deeply, collecting himself and attempting to smooth himself out. His nerves are like a mountain range.

"Dave?"


	5. Chapter 5

Ten days later, they are well on their way.

The going was tough at first, and Sollux went to sleep every night for six dats feeling a distinguished ache in his bones and muscles. Four days after that, Dave had still not explained his disappearance, or enclosed to Sollux where he had gotten the gun he had used to kill Nepeta or where he had gotten the gas mask that has taken the place of his songlasses, now inexplicably cracked and stowed into his pockets.

He seems different, now, and changes just a little with every day that passes, as if the optimism levels in him has sinply increased, as if he has sapped away Sollux's hope like a parasite. What Sollux notices most, though, is that he seems altogether less afraid. The occasions wherein he would rummage in his pack in search for the violet headband became more and more frequent along the way, but with every passing day his smile grows a little brighter as he does so.

Dave, by now, is certain that he will find his sisder.

Sollux, however, is growing less and less certain that he will ever see Aradia again.

On the tenth morning, they reach the next city. Dave is leading, walking a few metres ahead as Sollux trudges lethargically behind, in silence.

"There's a trading post here," Dave offers. More silence barks back at him, bouncing off the walls in the slowly widening alleyway. "Or there should be, anyway, from what I've heard of it. It may have been ransacked by now, though- Captor?"

Sollux shuffles his feet a little slower, a little louder. His shoulders are hunched , the muscles in his legs aching and his patience pulled taut. In all truthfulness, he had thought (and hoped) that this would be over soon. They'd look for a while, a few days worth of trekking, and then they'd find them all and have their long-awaited recollection.

Happily ever after, right?

Fat chance.

It's never that easy. The journey has lasted over a week already and shows no sign of letting up anytime soon. Dave gives away nothing other than locations, directions and destinations; nothing of what had happened in the short time that they had been seperated. As the days go on, Sollux finds himself thinking less and less of Aradia.

That scares him.

Especially since when he has been fading away from Aradia, Dave has seemed to be getting increasingly close to Rose.

The world has very suddenly become an incredibly fearful place.

Stopping to let the miserable boy catch up, Dave fiddles with the strap on his pack. He looks pretty healthy for a dead man walking (as had been Sollux's first thought when they had reunited). He's certainly not as skinny as Sollux is, not as paled, but at the same time he seems more worn, more tired. His fingers are calloused and there are scars on his hands and his arms and on what Sollux had seen of his face before he decided to switch to the gas mask.

"Captor?" he says again, though softer this time, quieter now that he knows Sollux can hear him.

He doesn't even entertain the thought of asking him if he's okay, because he knows he's not. None of them are. Sometimes people will pretend to be, of course, but at the end of the day it's the end of the world and nobody

_nobody_

is okay.

"Just a little further, after this place. We're over halfway."

"To where? Halfway to where?"

Dave seens surprised by the sudden question. He blinks, and for a moment Sollux can see him try to get his mouth around the next words from beneath the mask.

Sollux beats him to it. "How can you possibly know where they are?"

"I just do."

More silence. Sollux bites down at his tongue, and his fingers grasp slowly at the heavy quietness of it all. It doesn't seem like much of an answer, on Dave's part, but he decides not to argue. Cutting off the eye contact he's maintaining with Dave, Sollux barges ahead of him, deeper into the alley and closer to the city. When he gets to the other side, he is met with exactly the kind of destruction that he expected. Broken glass in little rivers in the gutters, blood on the ground and smouldering walls, ashy, broken beams. Dave keeps what Sollux assumes is a competely straight face (he can't tell, through the thick green material of his mask) and stands at the entrance.

"So much for a trading post," Sollux spits. It's the first time in ten days that he's felt at least a little bit alive, and while it seems a little stupid to be wasting that life on hatred, he doesn't care. He'll use it however he wants to. "Everyone seems to have up and left."

Dave doesn't say anything, just stands there, running the headband through a loop he's made with his thumb and index finger. He seems like he's thinking, but Sollux isn't planning to just let him think. Wordlessness isn't an answer to anything and Sollux wants action, he wants answers, and quickly.

"No leads here, then," Dave mumbles eventually, his voice wavering like a hand flying a white flag.

"No," Sollux responds bitterly. "None at all."

Bending over slightly, Dave reaches a hand up and slowly pulls off his mask. The elastic on the back of it makes a soft twanging noise as it flicks off of the back of his head, tousling his hair. His eyes are visible, now, conflicted with anger and surrender as he bows his head. He feels more exposed than ever, now, but now is not the time to worry about something so trivial.

Sollux can almost see the hope drain out of him. He watches as it collects in a small puddle on the ground, swirling with iridescent rainbows like oil would. It's a pretty tragic sight, pretty pathetic - and Sollux is irritated to think that his almighty guide, the one who spewed promises like churchgoers recite prayers, is giving up so easily.

It makes him a little more than certain that they are here for something other than a trading post.

Sollux punches a hole in the silence with a curt question.

"How many?"

Dave looks up, and Sollux's spirits lift marginally as he notices that his vague question had the desired effects. "How many cities are there? There's this one, then the one we came from, and there's a few more but nobody remembers the names-"

"No. How many bullets do you have left?"

Blink. Dave's fingers trail up and rub half-heartedly at his eyes.

"Four."

- and Sollux's heart is back in its anchor-like state, sinking further down.

Four isn't many at all, when you think about it. Sollux alone has seen about twenty of the cannibals, and he doesn't doubt for a second that there are more, hundreds or even thousands of them stumbling from building to building in search of supplies and fresh meat.

"Only four? Can't we get more?"

Dave barks out a rough laugh. "Get more? You really think we could? Bullets are just as rare as fuel. If anyone even finds us with the bullets we _do_ have..." He trails off. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what he was about to say next.

"Oh."

Taking a deep lungful of dangerous, gravelly air, Dave shrugs his pack higher onto his shoulders and resumes walking. Sollux's feet remain bolted to the ground.

"Dave."

"What."

"The mask."

Dave freezes and looks down at the object, clenched limply in his loose fist. He hesitates, as if he'd forgotten it completely before lifting it back up and securing it back onto his face. It's almost odd, Sollux thinks (and he's sure that Dave is thinking it too) how concerned his voice had sounded.

Standing still, Dave responds with a quiet, "Thank you."

For ten days more, they keep walking.


	6. Chapter 6

On the twentieth day, things are no better. If anything, they are worse. There have been quite a few occasions wherein Sollux has caught Dave walking with no mask on, especially in the dark, especially when he doesn't think that Sollux can see him. Every time that happens, Sollux has a go at him, growing more passionate with every time. (He doesn't like to admit that he's concerned. Concern is not the word.)

Sometimes, Dave will cough. And when he coughs it's never just one, staccato forcing of air out of his lungs, but a series. An entire song of rough, wet sounding noises, into his mask, and in the later days it bends him double and shakes his shoulders like someone would shake a suddenly dead acquaintance.

Sollux doesn't worry. This is Dave Strider and Sollux is not worried about him but when he listens to the outbursts he feels pity, he supposes. But it's really no little matter. Sollux can tell from the bouts that Dave has at the side of the road that this will not just get better, not at this rate. Even if they get their hands on medical assistance, dubious as it may be in these times, it will not be quick. It will not be easy. And this is assuming that Dave accepts the help, which is wholly unlikely. He's been picking up his pace lately, and while he's walking he doesn't ever put the headband away. He's reached a level of obsession that is undeniably unhealthy. When Sollux falls asleep at night, Dave is still up, sitting bu the dying, deprived fire and muttering incoherently to himself. When Sollux wakes up in the silent, ghostly mornings, Dave already has his pack on his shoulder, is already telling him to hurry up, that they've got a long day ahead of them.

He already has the headband in both fists.

Slowly, the days get longer. The dusty sunlight lingers for more time in the day, at first minutes, later hours. Dave says by the fire for longer.

"Mask," Sollux finds himself nagging for the thousandth time. There is no way of knowing what time it is, not when the sunlight is so distorted that it's almost impossible to tell whereabouts the sun itself is, but they've been awake and walking for about an hour.

"Fine," Dave spits, pulling the mask on with the annoyance of a stubborn child. He coughs again.

"What's wrong with you?" Sollux trots to catch up with Dave, his pack already considerably lighter than it had been when they started out. Their chances of finding a trading post before they run out of food are looking dim.

"What's... wrong?" Dave echoes uncertainly, his voice muffled. Sollux can't see his expression, but he always likes to imagine that it's a smile. The sad thing is that it's probably not. "Nothing's wrong."

"Is that blood on the edge of your-"

"I'm fine," he insists harshly.

They continue in silence. Dave continues his oscillating pattern of pretending things are okay and Sollux keeps his eyes fixed upon the ground. He's been speeding up lately, as if he knows that there's something ahead, and there probably is. With Dave, you can never know.

One night, he pulls out a large piece of paper and unfolds it on his lap. A map. A map Sollux didn't know he had. For a long while, he scrutinizes it, and Sollux creeps a little closer.

Dave notices.

He puts the map away.

The next morning, Sollux's footfalls are quiet as he pulls up beside Dave, noticing how the hair on the top of his head looks recently disturbed and sighing inwardly. One day, he'll have to glue that mask onto him. This is the third time today that they've stopped for Dave to check their route on the tattered, yellowed roll of paper, which strikes Sollux as odd, since they're not supposed to be headed anywhere in particular. Lately, the road has become smoother, more even - the chunks that the concrete has broken into have gradually grown until they stretch for a mile at a time, unhindered by cracks or potholes. A couple of cars even crop up along the way; the bodies of most are twisted and dented and riddled with rust, but some seem as if they would be functional if it weren't for the congealed puddles of half-melted black rubber that used to be their tyres.

It is, Sollux notices with a distinguished feeling of dread in the back of his mind, getting warmer.

Much warmer.

Dave even tells him not to keep even the smallest areas of skin exposed for long. When Sollux asks why with an argumentative stubbornness, Dave simply flicks his head in the direction of the sun - which, as ever, is dusty through the ash - and tells him he will burn. Not might, but will.

"Why?" the skinnier boy asks out of the blue, having dwelled on Dave's words again.

"What do you mean?"

"Why would I burn?" Sollux isn't stupid. He already knows full well why he would burn, but he just wants confirmation. The thoughts he's having aren't very nice, after all.

Dave points upwards, a much more noticeable gesture than the previous one. Sollux squints up at the blurred ball of grey-white light in the sky.

"It's getting closer."

Sollux swallows.

"It's dead set on exploding," Dave continues quietly. "At least, that's what Ro... what the news said." They both know well that Dave doesn't watch the news, but Sollux tries his best to pretend that he doesn't notice his slip up.

Sollux looks around him, at the world that he can see, at the scorched bark on the trees and the mangled metal of the cars further up the road. He looks at the grey sky and the flakes of ash that are perpetually falling from it, and he looks at the sticky, half-melted tarmac on the ground.

Finally, he looks at Dave. Dave, with the blood still dried in his hair, Dave, with the worn posture and scarred hands and Dave with the gas mask hiding his emotions.

"And?"

"And what?"

Sollux licks his lips from beneath the bandanna. "Do they think we'll survive?"

"You kidding? Nobody could ever survive something like that, dumbass."

Sollux thinks, for a while, of the dreams he had had a couple of years ago about another kind of apocalypse. A game, and those dreams had run on one after the other like some kind of story that he just had to go to sleep to see. They all died, in the end. The beginning and middle, too. Every last one of them died. But somehow, they all managed to fight their way back.

And that might be the case, once again.

"I suppose you're right," Sollux mumbles, keeping his thoughts neatly too himself. They carry on walking.


	7. Chapter 7

"Imagine that, though."

Sollux looks up with a mild, tired kind of interest, leaning back patiently against the back of the sofa. Aradia has been sitting on the floor, surrounded by various articles - which she has torn out of magazines from the library, much to Terezi's distaste once she had learned of it (and Aradia had responded with a quick remark of how she wouldn't have been able to read them anyway, to which Terezi quickly left with her nose in the air - for a couple of hours now, silent and completely engrossed in what she has been reading.

She holds up a page from an issue of Apocalypse Now, grinning like a child just presented with a new toy.

Sollux had never really understood her sadistic obsession with the end of the world, but it was harmless enough and made her happy and so he would never dream of stopping her.

"Zombies, Sollux, look. How cool would that be?"

The corner of his lips quirk with the ghost of a smile, and he leans forwards to study the page in more detail. It was glossy with a neat crease in the middle, where Aradia had folded it to make it fit in her satchel. The graphics consist of a few faded-out, hyper-realistic zombies that stare though the page into space with unfocused, milky-white eyes. Not exactly what you would usually imagine such an innocent-seeming girl to be taking such joy from. But appearances can be deceptive, Sollux supposes as he thinks of innocent little Nepeta, who is known to go out with her hunting in the dead of night and returning, proudly, with a brand-new deer pelt and a few missing bullets.

Aradia had always known exactly how to deal with the kinds of scenarios that she fantasized about, what to wear and what weapons to use and where to go.

Still looking down, apparently engrossed in the article, she stands, holding up the paper. Sollux doesn't really register as she gets up onto the sofa, crawling closer to him with the smile still shining on her lips. The only noise for a while is the rustling of the page between her fingers.

She places her hands on his knees. She breathes in his ear, and Sollux is certain that his breathing stops altogether. This is new. And as much that he would like to pretend that it is the good kind of new, he can't help but notice that something is-

Off. Something is off.

Moving ever closer, she places herself in his lap, her cheek aligned closely with his. Sollux can't move - not even an inch. He can't even blink as she winds her hand around his lower back.

As she turns her head.

As she licks his cheek.

There is a moment of shock as he tries desperately to prove to himself that it was a kiss and not a lick, but the lingering wetness on his skin tells him otherwise.

And then, in Nepeta's voice (not Aradia's voice, never Aradia's voice) she says those same words.

"Sollux, you taste delicious."

And he wakes up.

His heart is pounding as he does so, his skin drenched with sweat despite the chill in the air. Dave is, thankfully, asleep a couple of metres away from him, his breathing slow and even - although it will catch, every now and again, and almost wake him.

Shaking, he runs a hand through his hair, smoothing it down. There is dirt smeared on his face but there are tracks down beneath his eyes, and they're wet.

Sollux is crying. It's the first time that he's cried since he saw the family dead on the side of the road.

But the worst thing is that he's a little bit relieved, even in those circumstances, to have seen Aradia again. Even if she was a dream. Even if she wanted to eat him, just as Nepeta had.

After he's managed to calm down an acceptable amount, he finds more tears trailing down his cheeks as he realises what it could have meant, the dream. It could have meant that Aradia is still alive, yes

but

it could also mean

that she's just like the rest.


	8. Chapter 8

"Come on, then. Out with it."

Sollux has stopped counting the days that they have dragged themselves across the parched wasteland that is presumably Lousiana by now (if Sollux's compass and dubious sense of direction work properly). It hasn't been easy; they are on the brink of running out of food and water and Sollux can feel the soles of his feet burning more with every day as his shoes become worn down by the miles of hard ground. The supplies have had to be heavily rationed between them, until they can find either a trading post or a shop that hasn't yet been completely ransacked by desperate groups of survivors.

They've stopped yet again for Dave to pull the map out of the bag and study it. The only other item that he seems this attached to is the headband, and Sollux swears that one day Dave will start wearing it in yet another attempt to be closer to Rose.

"Where are we going?"

Sollux's voice is brisk, no-fuss, and he folds his arms stubbornly in front of his chest. He hates being lied to, and being left in the dark is almost as bad. He will refuse to continue walking until Dave gives him answers, and good ones that are at least a little more than a curt shrug of his shoulders. The relationship between the two lonely outcasts has not improved in the month or so that they have been trekking together; Dave is still vague and Sollux is still resentful.

"Where are we going?" he asks again, lowering his voice to nothing much more than a whisper.

Dave senses the danger.

"I told you. We're going to find the others."

"And we haven't, yet, have we?"

Sollux hopes for once that the look beneath Dave's gas mask is one of hurt, or at the very least, surprise. Sollux hopes that his words at least made a little bit of impact, at least were heard like a scream in a storm. And if they were a scream in dead silence, then that's just as okay.

"I know that-"

"Of course you do! You're the one who's been leading me on this bulls-"

Nothing more after that.

Sollux has to stop as soon as he sees that Dave has removed his mask. With some force, too - the elastic straps flick upwards and snap at the Texan's wrists, leaving red stripes on the pale, scarred skin.

Dave's eyes are burning scarlet and wet with angry tears.

"Do you not think I care, Captor?"

For once, Sollux has no words. They are folded up like unwanted mail and tossed into the gutters. His mouth hangs open for a while, his hands grasping at nothing in particular. Dave turns fully to face him, the hand holding the rolled-up map limply by his side, and the full force of his glare hits Sollux like a stray bullet.

"Do you not think I care about my lost sister? My bro, my mom? Do you not think I care that my friends are all missing?"

The last little rebellion of insensitive speech dribbles out of Sollux's lips.

"You sure didn't seem like it."

And just like that, the anger is gone. Dave inhales deeply and sighs just the same, running his free hand through his hair before reaching down to detach the violet headband from a strap on his pack. He smiles pensively at it, his expression completely enigmatic as he runs his gloved thumbs up and down the coloured silk skin of it.

"I try," he mumbles.

Sollux is stranded in a sea of uncertainty. It seems all too easy to reach forward and rub Dave's shoulder soothingly, all too easy to console him - so much so that Sollux almost does so. But that's the last kind of impression he wants to give, especially when it's so shakily but kindly gift-wrapped, and especially when it's to Dave.

"Dave?" he says instead, his voice a completely different kind of quiet. He sounds weak and tentative, and hopes that Dave doesn't notice that, or that he's called him by his first name and not his last, for once.

"Hm?"

"We're going to find them," Sollux says stiffly, shoving his fists into his pockets and not looking Dave in the eyes. He has yet to replace the mask, and in any other situation Sollux would be offhandedly nagging him to.

"Can I tell you something, Captor?"

Anxiety strikes Sollux's heart. "What is it?"

"I don't actually know where we're going."

At first Sollux suspects the confession to be deadly serious, but when he looks at Dave the corners of his lips are quirking upwards and his eyes seem friendlier, almost. He's teeling the truth, Sollux can tell at a glance, but he means for it to be something to laugh at.

And Sollux does laugh. Not because it's funny - because it isn't, at all, really - but because Dave is just as clueless as Sollux and that's endlessly relieving. They're all just as scared as each other, in the end. Dave readily joins in.

"Am I missing out on a joke?"

They stop.

A smug-sounding voice has spoken from behind a car a few metres to their right. For a few seconds, neither of them dare to look in the sound's direction, frozen in place like helpless deer. It takes Sollux a couple of seconds longer to register the familiarity of the tone.

"V...risk...a?"

There's a laugh, thin and high and fake, and Dave spins around so that he can see the girl by the time that she comes around the other side of the car, swaying cockily. She's probably pulling that stupid face where she puts her tongue flush on the roof of her mouth and hangs her mouth open. Sollux can't tell through the scarf.

Vriska is as lanky as ever, taller than both of the boys, long-legged and flat-chested. Her messy blonde hair is pulled up into a lazy side-ponytail, and she wears clothes that are in as bad a condition as Sollux and Dave's.

Altogether, she doesn't look all too worse for wear.

But Sollux has learned to be wary, especially after the run-in with Nepeta.

"Well, well, I seem to have caught myself a couple of flies!" she chimes, and Sollux grimaces. "Can I show you inside my web?"


	9. Chapter 9

To Sollux's surprise, Vriska is not a threat.

She shows them both inside her underground base, small but cool and out of sight. Sollux fazes out when she's going on about basing the design after the homes of trapdoor spiders, and looks around, squinting through the dark until she turns on a light. There's a single threadbare mattress in the corner with a couple of greying sheets tangled together on top of it, and a couple of cardboard boxes, probably filled with supplies, and a gas burner.

He wonders how she managed to get her hands on that.

They sit for a while, and all three wolf down their own can of spaghetti hoops (which Sollux thinks is bliss - it's the largest amount of food that he's had in one sitting in weeks) basking in the coldness and silence.

Dave breaks it.

"Are you alone?"

Vriska seems almost surprised by the question, which strikes Sollux as odd. After all, it's clear that she's alone, but a lot of things in the cabin suggest that there's another person who stays here with her. Two water butts, two blankets on the mattress, twice the amount of food that one person would need.

"No, I'm not," she says, and despite her expression her tone remains the same. Her cobalt eyes search Dave's red ones, but find nothing. Dave tries to convey curiosity and not suspicion, smiling at her and outstretching his arms.

"Who does the other side of your bed belong to, Marquise?"

She hisses, pulling air sharply between her teeth, her gaze becoming ever so slightly more heated, as if Dave has stoked at a fire behind them.

"John."

Dave's expression os that of a man who knows he has won. "Egbert, eh? Small world." He chuckles, as Sollux looks on evenly, watching how Vriska grits her teeth and looks away, flicking her hair melodramatically over her shoulder. It's an amusing sight.

Claiming that she's going out scavenging, she leaves the two of them alone to bathe with the containers of cold water and a couple of motheaten rags. They do so in silence, first washing the grime off of their faces, then their necks and then their arms and chests. Occasionally, they have to wring out the rags, watching the dirty water drip down into the container.

"What are the chances?" Sollux asks quietly at one point. Dave places the rag in his lap and falls still, not looking at the boy who is sat cross-legged behind him. He knows exactly what he means.

"Something tells me that she's been looking for us," he replies. His voice is still tired, still worn, but Sollux can clearly imagine him smiling, for once. And he feels the same thing as he's sure Dave is feeling; relief. Relief that they're not the last sane people that they know, relief because maybe this means that Rose and Aradia and all of the rest are out there somehow. Out there, and okay.

Vriska doesn't return all night. Sollux and Dave eventually decide to go to sleep, in the opposite corner to her mattress, curled up within their own torn blankets, and Sollux doesn't wake when the door opens and Vriska returns to the base.

In the morning, things are quiet, sound-proofed by half-wokenness, as the three of them wash again, in noticeably cooler water. Vriska offers to repair any tears in their clothes, and Sollux wonders what brought about such a change in character. He wonders, too, where John is, if not here with Vriska. But he decides that he doesn't need to know.

Dave tells him that they should continue by noon. They've washed and rested and fed - Vriska even gives them a couple of cans of cold food for the road - and now Dave seems eager to get out of there. He's seemed that way since John was mentioned.

"I thought he was your friend," Sollux whispers to him the moment that Vriska is out of earshot. "John. Wasn't he?"

"Yes, he was."

Dave's eyes flick downwards and he wrings his hands. "But didn't you see her? The way she looked when she told us? She was lying." He swallows. "John is dead."

Sollux doesn't say anything more. The confusion on his face is evident.

"I've seen loss before," Dave continues. "I know what it looks like." His voice is still, unmoving, almost robotic. Sollux doesn't know if he's feeling nothing, or is showing nothing. Dave is good at hiding everything, he has learned.

Everything but his smile when he looks at the headband. Nobody would be able to hide that.

Vriska seems almost insulted when Dave tells her that they are leaving. "What, is this place not good enough for you? Is that it?"

Dave doesn't laugh. He doesn't do much at all, really, just fixes her with a rigid stare. "Yes, that's exactly it, Serket. Let us go." And she does, begrudgingly, but she doesn't wave them off. She retreats back into the dimness of the base, grumbling. Dave makes no comment.

For a moment, they are suspended in viscous silence. Sollux takes a good, long look at his travel partner, taking in all of the scars and smears on him. He's replaced the mask, so admittedly Sollux can't make out much when it comes to exposed skin, but there's enough. The way he slumps, even when standing, portrays exhastion, even now that they've had a good night's sleep; even though Sollux doesn't know that he has. He can't know if Dave has slept all night or if he has sat by the gas burner with the headband as he had done for the whole evening when Vriska was absent, can't know whether or not Dave was just pretending to be asleep when Sollux had woken up.

The sky is just as stormy as yesterday, but motionless, as if the clouds of greyish brown ash are trapped in clear amber. The ground is still melted and ridged. The trees are still twisted and bent, like burned toothpicks sticking out of the ground.

Sollux pulls his scarf over his mouth and nose. Dave readjusts the mask.

"And here we go again."


	10. Chapter 10

"Can I ask you a question?" Dave's voice ripples through the silence, breaking Sollux out of his thoughts.

Sollux looks up.

"And will you answer it truthfully?"

He blinks, then nods. Dave's face is turned towards Sollux, his expression obviously unreadable. With his sleeve, he wipes at the circles of tainted glass on his gas mask, rubbing off the collected ash there.

"Do you think we'll find them?"

Sollux feels as if there is a lump of dust in his throat, as if he has swallowed a clump of it down, and he chokes. He wants to say yes. At the beginning of the journey, perhaps, he would have. But now? Now that he's seen one of 'them' die and known that one of 'them' is alone and that one of 'them' is dead, he isn't so sure. And no matter how he wants to say yes, he finds that he can't. So he shrugs.

Dave barks out a laugh and turns back to face the horizon, which is distorted with heat. "I don't know, either."

The road has given out to land that is... nothing, really. The occasional scorched tree and burned shrub will pop up, but other than that, it's all dry soil and boulders. Neither of the boys have any complaints, though. Both are prepared completely for whatever the world throws at them - or so they think. Of course, at the same time, they think that they've seen everything, which isn't true at all. They haven't seen death, yet, and they would prefer to keep it that way for years to come.

It is only when Sollux thinks this that he finds himself dwelling - for the first time - on what Dave said. That the sun is going to explode. It seems too big, too ridiculous to be true, seems like too much devastation for an already devastated planet to have to take. It just doesn't seem right.

Unconsciously, he moves on, thinking about what else Dave has said. When he said that he's seen loss before, that he knows what it looks like. It caught Sollux's ear, not because of what he said, but how he said it. He had sounded almost dreamy, uncertain, and for some inexplicable reason Sollux's thoughts went straight to the dreams. The game. All sixteen of them, versus the end of the universes.

Surely Dave hadn't-

No.

Sollux shakes his head and shakes the thought away. No, that's not possible. Next he'll be thinking that every single one of them had the dreams. Sollux is adamant that he was the only one. He's the only one that knows about the dreams, and it will stay that way.

Without Sollux really noticing, the sky grows dark. Thunder rumbles overhead, and both boys stop and look up. Before long, rain is sheeting down; the first rain that Sollux has seen since the world ended. It soaks them incredibly quickly, and both boys grab ripped anoraks out of their bags and throw them over their heads. Water runs down the banks, collecting in muddy puddles at their feet, and Dave decides to call it a night.

They pull over to a collection of gnarled, spindly trees. Dave throws down his bag and sits with his back against it. Sollux is about to do the same when there is a crack, ricocheting through the empty, sodden air. Both of them freeze.

It isn't thunder.

Dave looks down.

"Well," he says almost inaudibly. "Turns out Egbert isn't dead yet."

Sollux whips his head around, and sees Vriska striding towards them, her features contorted in the fiercest of angers, holding an old-looking shotgun. Her arms are shaking and her hair and clothes are soaked through with the rain, dust streaking down her face like warpaint.

"I'm not sorry," she calls over the showers.

Dave hasn't looked up.

And maybe Sollux spends a little too long looking at her, in shock, because there is a whisper beside him and he doesn't quite hear it because he had all but forgotten that Dave is there.

But it comes again.

"Sollux-"

Dave is holding out his pistol in a trembling hand.

But Sollux is not looking at that. Sollux is, in fact, looking at Dave's other hand, which is clutching at torn cloth, dappled white and scarlet, rain washing liquid away only for it to reappear and Sollux's eyes widen-

And he is caught between fire and flames because if he does not fight back then Vriska will surely kill him-

But if he does not save Dave then he is alone and he doesn't know where to go-

"I want my John back!"

Vriska's shouts break him out of it. His lips parted in a adrenalin-filled snarl, Sollux snatches the gun. He's never imagined himself as being good with guns, but he will sure as hell try his hardest. He thinks that, perhaps, this is one of those tricky little situations where you are given an either-or but actually if you time it just right you get an and.

Sollux is sure that he will not die. And Sollux is sure that he will not be alone, even as Dave's head falls back against the flaking bark of the blackened tree, even as more blood trickles down his hand and into his sleeve-

So he straightens. He holds the gun confidently in both hands, straight in front of him, looking down the simple sights and lining them up, just in front of Vriska's head, just as she calls out again-

"They won't give my John back to me!"

And pulls the trigger.


	11. Chapter 11

Sollux's eyes are closed the moment the gun is fired. All of a sudden everything seems slow-moving, trapped in quicksand, and it takes much too long for him to feel safe enough to open them again. He lowers the gun. There is the sound of movement from behind as Dave flinches, the wet sounds of the rain and over that the blood on the boy's coat. Sollux's wonders for a moment if he is dead, or if Vriska is dead, or if they all are. Maybe, if they are, then he can see Aradia and Dave can see Ross and Vriska can see John-

But that's out of the question. It only takes one thing to convince Sollux beyond doubt that he is still alive. It's a noise, an audio stimulus, and it snaps him straight back to his senses - sharp, as it is, like a knife edge over the soft, malleable lullaby of the rain hissing on the hard ground. Vriska laughs, tossing her head back (as Sollux sees once he opens his eyes again) and slacking her grip on the shotgun ever so slightly. The bullet had missed completely, Sollux realises with a distinct sinking feeling in his stomach. There aren't even any extra signs of damage on her jacket.

Fuck.

"Impressive, Captor!" she taunts icily, provoking a grimace from Sollux and another shift from far. One more of those and Sollux won't be able to ignore him anymore - but even so, he dreads to look anywhere but into Vriska's mocking gaze.

She raises her gun again, and there is a series of clunks as she loads and cocks it.

He doesn't.

Pressing the butt up to her cheek, she glares down the sights and aims. Sollux wonders where she's aiming, whether his death will be quick, but he can't know, so he doesn't think much longer. Vriska's expression is no longer so much a smile as it is a snarl, and her eyes narrow as her index finger slips off of the guard and hovers just millimetres away from the trigger. Sollux holds his breath.

A click, and a bang. Sollux squeezes his eyes shut - and there isn't a single noise from Dave. Sollux spends what would be his last moments wondering if his partner is already dead.

But for the second time, he is mistaken. Again, he opens his eyes to see Vriska, who seems to be growing increasingly frustrated as she looks over her gun. There is smoke rising from the barrels, dissipating into the harsh rain.

"A blank! You gave me a fucking blank!" she screams, pointing an accusing finger at Sollux, who, despite the situation is trying not to show his relief. "You asshole!"

There's a voice from behind him, quiet but well heard above the storm. "It wasn't him, Serket." Sollux spins around. Dave is sitting in twice the amount of blood that he had been before. His mask is gone, and his skin is paler than it had been, and the little crystals of rain show clearly on his cheeks. He is smiling. "It was me."

Vriska is conflicted for a moment. She has no bullets left, and Sollux still has three. She is outnumbered. Tension stretches between them like a rubber band. It snaps. Vriska runs.

Ever so slightly, the rain lets up, and Sollux breathes his relief as it eventually fades to a thin sheen of drizzle, painting his skin. Light begins to filter through the clouds again, but the sky is still an ominous dark grey. It hasn't finished yet.

"Hey."

Dave voice is weak enough to break on that one syllable, and Sollux faces him, the fear that he has suppressed" until now bubbling up in his throat. The blood is everywhere by now, and Dave's hand is loosely held over his midriff.

Right now, Sollux thinks he might be more frightened than he has ever been. He swallows thickly, kneeling beside Dave with his hands on the other's shoulders.

"I'm so sorry."

"It's no use," Dave whispers as Sollux begins to remove his jacket. His lips are still held in a tiny crooked smile.

"Bullshit," Sollux spits back, shooting daggers at Dave, who sighs and lets his head loll against the tree trunk. Gritting his teeth, Sollux rips a strip of material from the bottom of his undershirt, then another, then another. The ash-tainted fabric blossoms red as soon as it touches Dave's side.

There's not much hope.

There never has been, really.

"I'm dying."

"No you're not."

"Captor."

Sollux doesn't stop trying. He doesn't stop tearing and pressing and tying and watching the blood collect beneath the fabric and eventually soak through. It's like a slow lava flow - not immediate, but dangerous, inevitable.

"Captor."

A few minutes later, Sollux touches his cheek to find something a little warmer than rain.

He's crying.

He's fucking crying, and Dave is bleeding out on the ground at his knees and Sollux can't do anything but cry like a baby-

"Sollux!"

Choking, he falls still. Dave isn't smiling anymore.

"Go to sleep."

"Dave-"

"Go the fuck to sleep, Captor."

Sollux looks at him, long and hard, taking his hands carefully off of his side. His palms are printed with blood, now, which too is being washed away by the rain. Eyes turned downwards, he shrugs his coat back on, doing it up and deciding not to use his blanket. Instead, he drapes it over Dave, ignoring the look of shock he gets from the injured boy, and takes the other blanket out of Dave's pack and puts that over him too.

"You'd better still be alive when I wake up," Sollux says, giving Dave a meaningful look. Dave says nothing.

Shrouded in the silence of tragedy, Sollux curls up against the foot of another tree and falls asleep.


	12. Chapter 12

The next morning, it is still dark. There are no shadows (and Dave had always said that that's a bad thing, because you can never tell if someone was hiding) and hardly any light. Sollux wakes up shivering and covered in a thin sheen of drizzle and sweat - and he catches a glimpse of his hand to see that the small amount of blood left on his palm has dried into the cracks.

Almost panicked, he looks at Dave.

His chest rises and falls slowly - almost too slowly - but evenly and his expression doesn't look too pained. With a deep breath, Sollux stands, striding over to the other tree and taking Dave's mask out of his pack. As he is securing it on the other's face, he speaks, scaring the shit out of Sollux.

"I didn't know you cared so much."

Sollux is at a loss for words. He makes a strangled noise, looking wide-eyed at Dave as he pushes the blankets down to his knees, squinting up at him with one eye closed.

As if he is so strongly in denial of feeling relief or sadness, he feels anger instead. His fists clench on the edge of Dave's scratchy blanket, and he bows his head, his chest constricting in an attempt to keep his breathing regular.

"You asshole."

"I don't see what I did wrong."

"You asshole!"

Dave doesn't argue. Sollux's heart is galloping in his chest, his eyes straining in his skull with the force of his fury.

"Do you really think it's fucking okay to give up like that? To leave me!? You're a complete, utter, dickwad!"

But Dave is not okay enough to deny it. He is pale and drenched in cold sweat and his hands are shaking as they ghost over the half-arsed bandage on his hip. The blood beneath him is almost dried, left in a puddle of almost jelly-like, stringy substance. His breaths are as ragged as they always have been.

Alive or not, Dave is injured, and alive or not, Sollux will have to help him walk. Possibly even carry him. Which is completely out of the question; Sollux is malnourished and perpetually tired and weak, and will never be able to support even the weight of the equally stick-like boy.

"I'm sorry."

And Dave possibly sounds the most sorry that he ever has. And, right now, underneath the twisted young tree and the churning sky, it could almost be poetic.

Instead, Sollux just thinks that it is sad.

With an exasperated, exhausted sigh, Sollux sits next to Dave, running a hand through his grimy hair and looking at the ruined plain before them. They've got a lot to cover in very little time.

"Two more weeks." Dave recites his estimate as if he has been reading Sollux's mind - although he's probably just noticed the way he's looking ahead. "We'll be there in a fortnight."

"Not at this rate," Sollux says. iNot at any rate,/i he adds in his head.

"It's not my fault."

Stark nothingness rings through the air.

"I know it's not."

The day progresses slowly, with Sollux eventually deciding to pack up by noon and move on. Dave looks apprehensive, hissing as he inches his back further and further up the tree trunk until he is standing.

Sollux offers Dave his shoulder.

Dave declines.

They both agree to walk to the next town. They will stop there, rest, and perhaps even get more supplies and treatment for Dave if there is anyone of sound mind there. By Dave's predictions, it will take them four or five days.

"Can you make it?"

"Hm? Of course I can make it."

Sollux only half believes him. The fear that he had felt the night before, however, has subsided quite a lot, translated into acceptance. Dread-filled, but acceptance all the same. He knows all too well that death is an inevitable side effect of life.

And Dave does, too, by the sound of it.

iI know what loss looks like./i

It's only when Sollux catches the odd look that Dave is giving him that he notices he probably said that aloud.

"You dwell on things a lot, don't you?" Dave observes, tilting his head to the side. Sollux shoves his gas mask back into his lap, and Dave rolls his eyes.

"I don't know."

And really, it sounds stupid, but he doesn't know. He never really focuses when his mind goes off on one of its mostly pointless tangents, so why should he? It's more daydreaming, than anything.

"Do you want to know about...?"

"Do I want to know about what?"

"Where I've- never mind."

Sollux gives him an odd look. They say nothing more.

Two hours later, they are only barely a kilometre away from where they rested, mostly due to Dave having to restrict his movements to slow, gradual steps and the occasional deep, rattling breath. He's struggling, Sollux thinks, but then his chest constricts a little as he remembers that he's been struggling this whole time. But although the episodes on the side of the road have become more frequent, he's been noticing them less and less.

Apart from one.

Dave heaves, bent double, for a good five minutes before Sollux decides to intervene. He places his hand on the boy's shoulder, then his lower back, then his chest. All are shaking, trembling with force and fear.

Sollux's question is a simple, "Are you okay?"

Expecting another curt dismissal, he prepares to chastise Dave and baby him (in the harshest and least motherly of ways) until he manages to collect himself. But it doesn't come - instead Dave shakes his head.

Red streaks the road. It splatters, congregating like a crowd of fearful onlookers.

"Dave!"

There's more there than ever before. Little rivers are beginning to collect at their feet, trailing away before flattening and drying. Without realising, Sollux has gripped onto Dave, holding him tightly around his ribs.

"Breathe, breathe, c'mon."

Nothing happens. Dave continues to choke and splutter, blood beginning to trickle down beneath his mask and spray onto his collar with every movement. Every lungful of air that he draws in is a last breath.

Sollux remains perfectly still. He waits for Dave to stop.

And eventually, he does. Dave straightens, taking a series of shallow, shaky breaths before trying to pry Sollux's hands away from his middle.

They don't budge. Dave tries again.

"You're an idiot," Sollux whispers through his scarf. Dave seems almost upset by that, and Sollux knows it isn't the feeble insult.

"Yeah," he breathes, almost to himself. "Maybe I am."

And then he falls limp in Sollux's hold.


	13. Chapter 13

Sollux's first reaction is one of panic. The shaking comes first - always the shaking - first from where his grip remains and then from his shoulders. Dave flops limply, his skin cold, clammy, and Sollux knows then that he is blindly prepared to do anything to let him live. Desperate, he takes one last look at Dave's face, before sliding the mask back down. His eyes are closed, at least, and for Sollux that is a blessing. From Aradia he knows that people's eyes do not automatically close when they die, but they're not out of hot water yet. Carefully, Sollux lays him down, moving away from the pool of quickly drying blood and gently nestling Dave amongst the small dusty stones on the ground.

Dave doesn't stir. His head lolls, his muscles completely loose, unresponsive. Sollux says his name. Nothing happens.

This time, Sollux is not crying. He is not happy with letting his emotions get in the way of helping his friend - and, he supposes, despite everything, he iis/i his friend. He is not that weak. (But still, pain wells up in his chest, dry heat, like he would imagine it would feel to have that exploding sun within his ribcage.)

He isn't sure how long he calls his name for. He only knows that, at one point, he fell next to Dave, his body curling up flush against the other's side, and let - after some attempts at fighting back - sleep envelope him like gentle, foamy waves.

It's nice to think that he has a friend, finally, after being so lonely for so long. It's one rung up the ladder on the way to Aradia, that's for sure.

And god, does he miss Aradia.

Through the dusty afternoon, he sleeps soundly, subconsciously feeling the still warmth of Dave against his back. He dreams - he always does - of foggy, swimming shapes, faraway smiles and magazine articles of the end of the world. He dreams of untied ends of red string, cracked and burned and cut, and he dreams of friends.

But when he wakes, he feels more alone than ever.

Sollux has never liked not knowing. Maybe that's why he hasn't particularly enjoyed the apocalypse - he hasn't liked not knowing how it happened, not knowing what is ahead, not knowing where your next friend or enemy will come from.

But possibly not knowing where he is is the worst kind of unawareness of all.

The room is big, but dirty, the warmth of sickness and cold of silence heavy in the air. Sollux lifts his head quickly - he has been lying in a parasite-infected cot, draped in a fleabitten old fleece as he slept. A bunker, he thinks, as he looks at the ceiling. This is where they bring the survivors for medical assistance.

Medical assistance - the words ring in his skull like the angry buzzing of wasps. There's only one person he can think of.

"Dave?" he calls feebly. His voice is raw and dry. Someone a couple of beds away hushes him hoarsely. It's night, by now, and they're all trying to get what little sleep that they can on the tiny, uncomfortable beds.

A couple of people dressed in clothes that were probably once white are milling around, winding between the beds and every now and again leaning down to check on the inhabitants. Sollux tries to inconspicuously catch the eye of one of them, but it's no use. None of them are close enough. So, instead, he vouches for sticking his hand in the air and waving; and it isn't long before someone notices. Taking their time, they approach him, and after a moment Sollux sees their face - it's a woman, young, possibly Asian. Pretty. And, thank god, she's probably one of the least threatening people he's met. Her fingers are slim and gentle-looking, her features soft and kind.

"We have a live one," she says. Her voice is silky, and it would scare Sollux a little but the corner of her eyes crinkle with the first signs of a smile.

She glides over to him, hushing him and telling him to lie back down, speaking to him. Her words slip over his head, however, soft and sweet like a lullaby, and slowly, he feels himself drifting off to sleep, until-

"Where's Dave?"

The lullaby stops. Her hands, he realises, have been smoothing through his hair, brushing down the twig-like strands, but they fall still now.

"Dave?" she asks. "Who's Dave?"

"My friend." Sollux doesn't even think twice about saying that. He's sitting up, all too quickly, and his head turns and his eyes dart about.

No sign of him.

"He came in with me. About my age, blond, has a gas mask. Bullet wound on his hip- is he okay?"

Nothing. She says nothing, just looking on cluelessly. Eyes wide, Sollux looks down to see that he has been gripping her arm. "Please," he chokes. She's shaking her head, slowly.

"I don't know. I'm sorry."

It all comes rushing to him then. It's as if she's reading from the book of things he doesn't want to hear, things he doesn't want to happen, because all he wants right now is a familiar face, Dave's or Aradia's or even fucking Eridan's - he'd even settle for that-

Not caring about the selfishness of it all, he wonders what he will do, now that he's alone. He doesn't know what way to go, he doesn't have a map and he doesn't have the street smarts that Dave had.

Like butterfly wings, her fingers are moving over his head again. Sollux zones back in and feels wetness on his cheeks, once again.

"What's that smell?"

The nurse falls still.

"They're burning the bodies."

Silence crashes through the bunker.

Dave Strider is probably one of them.


	14. Chapter 14

Sollux isn't sure how long he spends in the bunker. The days blend together, bleeding like watercolours, one shade into another. He sleeps, he eats, and not much more than that. The nurse - whose name he has learned to be Atiya - tells him that usually the cots are reserved for only those close to death, but that he has been allowed to stay as there is no immediate demand.

Of course, he doesn't want to leave. He hasn't got anywhere else to go. Dave has most likely been reduced to a pile of ashes and buried a few metres away from the entrance, and the map is nowhere to be found. Given the world's circumstances, it was probably taken by some desperate onlooker, along with Dave's clothes and other belongings. Maps are priceless, now, if you know how to read them. There was doubtless a fight over it. Blood was probably spilled.

Sollux grimaces at the idea and rolls over in the cot.

Every morning, the doors open just slightly, and bodies are carried out in bed sheets and new people enter, looking around warily and locating a bed. Sollux tries his hardest not to look at the swathed bundles, but he always ends up watching them as they sway, gently, like lifeboats on the side of a ship as they are carried out on the shoulders of two workers.

According to Atiya, the bunker was set up by a man who had still managed to be rich at the end of the world. He paid greedy people (but foolish and naïve people, for they didn't understand that there wasn't really any use for money anymore) to help him build the shelter and the beds and find willing volunteers. Atiya is one of those volunteers.

He asks her how many people are taken out in the mornings. She doesn't answer straight away, just smiles sadly at him and runs her hand through his hair again, the look in her eyes vague and dreamy.

"Too many to count."

Sollux loses more hope than the world loses lives with every passing day.

In what he estimates to be the second week, he turns over in bed to see that the bed two away from him is empty. The irritable man who had hushed him is dead.

If things had gone as planned, he would be with Aradia by now - if, of course, Aradia was still alive.

And now he doesn't even have Dave.

From the very beginning, really, he knew that happily ever afters did not exist. They never existed. And Sollux was foolish for even having the fleeting impression that he would ever get one. It wasn't like a raffle, they weren't given out at random - that was just a lie so that young children might believe that their success would find them, and that they wouldn't have to go hunting for it. Children believe.

Sollux Captor is not a child.

He is, however, as afraid as one. He is terrified, not of cannibals or weapons or spiders or anything as material as that. He is terrified of the future.

You can't hold the future, so you can't throw it away.

One day, the bunker shakes. It's as if it's scared, too, but it's much too forceful to be wind and Sollux knows for definite that tents and bricks do not get frightened.

Atiya looks concerned.

That day was the day the earthquakes started. Clearly the world's Teutonic plates had decided that the shocks had been too much for them to take. And it wasn't just the earthquakes that scared people so much - it was what potentially followed.

Volcanic eruptions. Tsunamis. Floods. Cracks in the earth and tears on the horizon, rippling slowly closer until they swallow you. It is then that Sollux knows the world is not at all safe, and it is even more dangerous now that there is a Dave-shaped hole in the cot beside Sollux.

Days turn into weeks. Sollux is dreaming less and less of the others, and more of indistinguishable shapes, black grins and white fire.

One morning, he wakes up and can't even remember Dave's name. It comes back, though, after a couple of blinks and eye-rubs.

Atiya approaches him at one point, holding some fresh white clothes and a quiet smile. "They're asking for you to help us. We are short of hands since-"

She pauses. One of the patients had attacked one of the workers a couple of days earlier. Both were burned outside in a flurry of fleshy ashes. They both recollect the event in silence.

"Since that."

Atiya nods.

Sollux takes the bundle tentatively, scrubbing absently at the grime that's collected on his cheeks. "I'll do it. I owe you, anyway."

"Thank you." And she seems entirely thankful, her smile widening immediately.

And so, for another fortnight, Sollux helps. He tends to his share of the new wave of casualties that stumble through the bunker's doors after the earthquakes and floods - the second stage of the rapture, as it was known. Some are kept by the door.

Those ones die in the night. By morning, the coughing is halved. Death flutters through the air.

"Any sign?" Sollux mutters to Atiya through the scarf he has pulled over his muzzle again - they're burning more bodies and the smell of singing flesh and hair is never pleasant. The search for Dave has not been dropped (and Sollux doubts that it will any time soon) but it has certainly become more brisk, businesslike. His tone is like that of someone asking about the weather.

"I'm afraid not."

But, right then, there is a shout from outside.

"Oi! This ain't your place, asshat! Get away from 'er!"

Nothing, for a couple of beats.

"They've already stripped 'er! There's nuffink of value there!"

And before Sollux realises it, he's running outside. He flings open the tall doors with the force of a stampeding herd of wildebeest. There isn't much of a chance, but Sollux is willing to take what he can get. The first lungful of air is the worst. Sollux, however, ignores the scraping in his oesophagus like sandpaper.

Because he's seen exactly who he wants to see.

But not exactly how he wants to see him.

Dave is bent double, knees digging into the hard earth, his head in one hand and the other winding with the fingers of another. Sollux trails his eyes up the arm to see a bare, pale body, eyes closed and face loose and calm.

It doesn't take a genius to see that Dave is crying. Sobs wrack his body like the earthquakes did the world, shaking him and pulling his clothes taut and showing just how thin he really is.

Sollux takes a sharp intake of breath.

Rose Lalonde is dead.


	15. Chapter 15

All too quickly, Sollux's hands are on Dave's shoulders, and then around his chest, and he's pulling him upwards and hugging him tightly and Dave is still sobbing and shaking violently and he grabs blindly at his sister's body as Sollux pulls him away-

"Captor," Dave rasps, and Sollux feels warmness drip onto his hands. "Captor."

He twists around at a speed that is almost painful, hugging back and crying that much harder into Sollux's shoulder until he can feel tears soak through his thick coat and onto his skin. And still, Dave just clutched tighter onto him. Sollux knows the feeling - want for familiarity in a world so foreign and frightening and full of loss.

The world is no longer as scary as it was.

Over all else, it is sad. Heart-wrenchingly so.

"Captor," he gasps again. "Oh, fucking hell. It's you-"

Dave sounds angry and terrified and overjoyed all at once and Sollux knows to do little else than hold him and wait for the moment to pass. Really, he should be getting Dave inside the bunker, but this feels important - the first rung on the ladder to isomething./i (Sollux doesn't know what that something is, yet.)

"I'm sorry."

"She's gone."

"I know. I'm sorry."

Sollux is filled to bursting with so many questions but the urge stops, just at the tips of his fingers and the edge of his tongue. He can't ask him anything yet. Dave is just too damaged.

"Come on," he breaks in after a while, hooking Dave under his arms and lifting him carefully into a standing position. He's wearing his mask, thank god, but he's thinner and dirtier and his breathing is much more laboured. "Let's get you inside."

Atiya seems bewildered but welcoming when Sollux reenters, Dave in tow, his shoulder and lapel damp with tears.

"Is this your friend?"

"Dave Strider."

"I thought so."

Dave drops into one of the cots with no need of an invitation and Atiya gets straight to unbuttoning his coat. He flinches a little when she gets low enough to brush against his hip, and Sollux is struck with mild concern.

"Your wound," Atiya observes softly.

"How do you know?"

Nothing else is said in answer. Atiya just looks over to Sollux.

"Can I take a look?"

Dave doesn't agree, but he doesn't refuse, either, and that's as good as permission gets. She slips off his coat and pulls up the hem of his undershirt, clicking her tongue when she sees the injury.

"Infected. Wonderful."

She thrusts the coat into Sollux's arms. It's almost as if she has a complete personality change when there's work to do.

"Do we have any antiseptic left in the supply?"

Sollux doesn't know. He is willing to check, however. The coat still in his arms, he scurries off, wrinkling his nose as he catches a whiff of burning body. He thinks of Rose, naked and milky white and almost smiling in death.

That image will not leave him for several years of marish nights to come.

When he returns, Dave is pressing the top of his head back into the cot's thin mattress, his fingers curling into fists and his jaw clenching and unclenching - and Atiya has a pair of tweezers and a scalpel. The former is by now a couple of inches in his flesh.

"The bullet is still inside," she explains.

Sollux shifts from foot to foot and places the almost-empty bottle of antiseptic by Dave's side. Atiya nods gratefully.

A few minutes, a length of thread, and countless swear words later, Sollux has a cluster of small metal shards in his palm. Atiya checks Dave over one last time, before giving him the all-clear and padding off.

"Let him sleep," she nags Sollux.

He sits on the edge of the cot next to Dave, his legs swinging ever so slightly, just watching Dave's seemingly effortlessly relaxed expression (even with the occasional twinge of pain that he shows). When Atiya is out of sight, he leans in.

"Where were you?" he asks, and Dave shifts but doesn't open his eyes.

"Searching."

"Without me?"

A sigh rattles through Dave's chest. He shakes his head, opening his eyes, finally, and looking up at Sollux. He looks tired.

"For you."

"You mean you were..."

Dave sits up, and Sollux trails off. He has half the mind to tell him to lie back down, but the words don't come.

"After the little moment I had at the side of the road, we both slept, yeah? Well, when I woke up, you were gone." He pauses to give Sollux a heated and accusing glare. "A group of people found me and... well, nursed me back to health or whatever and I gave them some food and went on my way. Didn't know I'd find you cosying up next to a random gal." He chews his lip. "That's the abridged version of events."

Sollux decides not to feel guilty, and decides not to defend himself and argue against Dave's skewed impression of his and Atiya's relationship. "Did you see anyone?"

"See anyone?"

"Any of us."

Dave looks suddenly somber. "No."

Sollux breathes out slowly, looking at the ceiling. There is the sound of movement as Dave lies back down, and in the strangled light of the morning, they both sleep.


	16. Chapter 16

Dave heals surprisingly quickly with Atiya's help. In a matter of days, the bullet hole is reduced to a red, fresh scar, and they're both forced to say Sollux's least favourite word.

Goodbye.

But they do it anyway. Atiya is okay with them leaving, and they bid each other farewell and good look in a bittersweet exchange of words and hugs and handshakes. It lasts a good half hour, and by the end of it Dave is impatiently tugging at the back of Sollux's scarf and telling him they need to leave. By the time that they do, the sun is already high in the sky and the heat is already bordering on unbearable.

Sollux silently promises that he won't forget her, and she does the same.

Within ten minutes, the bunker is out if sight, barely a speck of sand on the far horizon behind them. Sollux chooses not to look back until they are well away. Dave begins to explain as they walk, telling him that he's heard word spread of a shelter not far away, where survivors readily collect and share news.

Telling him that they might find the others.

Actually, at first, he tries to say that they might find Aradia and-

And he stops himself before he can say Rose.

The morning that they left, Sollux saw Dave with the headband again. But he never saw it after that. Whether he threw it into the body-filled bonfire or he just never took it out, Sollux doesn't know.

Dave is clearly worse. He's slower, which is the most noticeable thing, and he limps and the breaks that he quietly demands to have are more and more frequent as the day goes on.

And when Sollux is standing on his right, Dave has to turn his head completely to look at him. Sollux hasn't seen underneath the gas mask and him with his eyes open and in the light all at once, but he knows what he would probably see.

Dave is half blind. Sollux isn't letting him take off that mask if he can help it.

When Dave asks if they can stop for the day, the sun is barely even down. Rays still loiter at the very bottom of the sky.

"We're not going to make it in time!" Sollux protests.

"There isn't a time limit, Captor."

Sollux can tell that he wanted the rebuttal to be harsh, but it isn't. It's more than just a little bit weak, and Dave places his pack down at the side of the road. He's not budging, the stubborn idiot.

"Aren't we going to find a place more sheltered?" Sollux asks, frowning and looking further up the road.

"No."

They say no more. Dave seems more than happy to sleep in a place so exposed, but Sollux decides to stay awake just in case. Or, at least, he decides try to. It's too difficult, even after a day of not much exertion (comparatively), to keep his eyes open, and all too soon he finds himself in a place that is certainly not the waking world.

For the first time in almost eighteen months, by his count, he has one of his recurring dreams. Dave is there, along with Aradia and Vriska and Rose, all dressed in their odd looking robes, red and red and gold and gold and Vriska and Aradia are both those odd-looking grey things again. He never quite understood the significance of that (especially not the horns) but he didn't object.

Dave pulls a gun from behind his back. This is odd, above all, because in the way of weapons Dave only ever had a sword.

He aims it squarely at Vriska's forehead. His grip is shockingly steady, his gaze held firm with what looks like pure hatred.

Sollux's voice tries to cry out, to distract him, anything, but nothing comes of it. Aradia and Rose just smile passively on either side of the two.

There is a bang, so loud that Sollux isn't sure whether he really heard it or it was just the dream, but he doesn't wake up so he reckons it's safe to assume that it isn't real.

Vriska has a hole in her head.

She just smiles.

They all just smile.

And Sollux wakes up screaming.

His voice is raw and wet as he carries on screaming until he can see the sun above him and the ground below him but even then he's not okay. He feels stupid, really, because it wasn't real but it just seemed so there-

He places a hand on his head. There's nothing there, no horns, just tousled hair but even that's not enough proof. He reaches a hand out, fingers squirming and searching and-

Dave  
isn't  
there.

Dave is, in fact, stood a couple of metres away, leaning heavily on the stock of a shotgun.

Dave doesn't have a shotgun. Dave has a pistol. Something is very, very wrong here.

There's something wet on Sollux's face, too heavy and hot to be tears. Without really wanting to, he touches it.

His fingers come away red.

There are fragments of bone and flesh in his lap, chunks of what looks like brain. Sollux's stomach lurches. Shaking violently, he turns away from Dave - who is not looking at him, he can tell - and looks over his shoulder.

Vriska is there, on the ground.

There is a hole in her head.

She is smiling.


	17. Chapter 17

Sollux screams even harder, scrambling to his feet and tripping over his sleeping bag. He tries again, crying out and reeling away from the still-warm corpse, past Dave and falling into the ground a couple of metres away.

It isn't that he's just seen a dead body. He's seen plenty, between wandering city streets and working in the bunker with Atiya. It's that it's Vriska's body, and it (she?) is there, just like his dream, and that little clusters of brain and bone are stuck to his chest and his shoulder and the back of his head.

He feels sick.

Dave does nothing.

As far as Sollux can tell, he's looking at the sunrise, back bent, shoulders hunched, leaning heavily with both arms on the gun. Vriska's gun, the gun she shot Dave with. And the gun that killed her, too.

"I'm tired," Dave whispers. Sollux barely hears it.

"Dave?"

"She's dead," he responds numbly, as if it isn't obvious, as if Sollux needs confirmation. Looking around for the first time, he nods at his own gun, which lies a couple of metres away from him. The barrel is badly dented. "She attacked first, though. Ruined a perfectly good pistol. What a waste."

Sollux just blinks at him, as if he's speaking a different language. The silence that follows is awkward, over all else, and Sollux doesn't really know what to do.

"We're moving on," Dave says mechanically. Sollux's eyes open wide.

"Are we just going to leave her here?"

Dave skips a beat, looking evenly at the body. "Yes."

"We can't just..." Sollux goes quiet, thinking. "That's disrespectful."

Laughing bitterly, Dave faces the sun again. "Me? Disrespectful? You're forgetting that this is the person who tried to kill us both to avenge a guy we didn't kill." (It's sad, that Dave refers to who used to be one of his best friends as 'a guy'. Maybe it's a coping mechanism.)

"I suppose-" Sollux stops as Dave gives him a dirty look. At least, Sollux thinks he does. Maybe he should stay quiet for the rest of the morning.

And he does.

They make good progress, in comparison to the day before's, and Dave seems to be infused with a new kind of stoic motivation. He's leading, again, walking a few paces ahead just like he had been when they first started out.

He doesn't get the map out, either, Sollux notices. And, just as with he headband, he isn't sure if Dave doesn't want it out or that he doesn't have it anymore. Either way, Sollux thinks Dave has gotten much stronger in the time that they've been apart. It's upsetting that he must feel that he has to be. He hasn't even mentioned Rose.

Sadder and sadder.

And the world never stops turning. It's like a brave soldier, marching forward as its men crumble behind it. Sollux wonders whether, if the world was conscious, it would know what was before it.

Weeks pass before they reach the other shelter. From Dave's explanation of events, Sollux had expected for the journey to last a couple of days. But, of course, with Dave, that's never the case. He doesn't lie, exactly, but he does leave a lot to the imagination.

"Dave?" comes Sollux's voice through the dark one night. Dave turns over in his sleeping bag.

"What?"

"Do you think we're going to live?"

Dave drums his fingers on the canvas of his coverings. "I'm not sure, Captor."

Sollux has asked that question before, he's certain. But he never really remembers the other answers, because they're constituted of shoulder shrugs and lies. This answer, he won't forget, because it's the most negative he's ever gotten. Dave is dying.

Or maybe he's already died. Maybe he died on the ground outside the bunker as he was shaking Rose's cold, dead shoulders. Maybe Sollux has been walking with a corpse this whole time.

The other shelter is larger than Sollux had expected, and underground, just like Vriska's had been. There's a small trapdoor at the side of the road, and Dave practically skips over to it when it's noticed. Sollux doesn't see what he's so happy about at first, seeing as it's mostly obscured by leaves and dirt, but Dave brushes it away to reveal the tarnished iron of the door.

He knocks on it, three times, slowly. The collection of dull thuds reverberates beneath their feet. It seems almost impossible, now that Sollux sees the door, that they have found it. It's such a tiny thing in such a large world.

Muffled voices are heard beneath them, but Sollux can't make out what they're saying. Dave presses his ear to the door.

"Have you got space for two more?" he asks. The shuffling stops.

A cry of 'no' comes above all the rest, and Sollux's stomach sinks. Wonderful.

But then another voice is heard, closer than all the rest, right up against the door. It's soft, but loud and eloquent. Female, most likely, but Sollux can't be sure.

"Of course."

Dave hurries to his feet. Seconds later, the door is flung open.

Inside, it's dark, with only the glow of the occasional oil lamp to illuminate the space. From what they can tell, the shelter is made up of multiple rooms - about three or four - approximately ten metres squared. Beds are crammed in, converted into bunks, and Dave and Sollux are shown to one near the door. Dave seems to have a bit more of a spring in his step (although it might just be the flickering of the flames) and Sollux feels happy for him.

Sollux squints ahead at their guide. He's fairly sure it's the person who opened the door for them, in which case he is certain that it's a woman. She moves with a surprising grace in the dingy room, and actually seems pretty well dressed.

Now who would consider fashion at the end of the world?

He doesn't get around to saying her name. Dave says it first.

"Maryam?"

She continues to walk away. Dave huffs impatiently, and, dropping his pack, half-jogs after her. In a fevered attempt to stop her, he places both hands on her shoulders and spins her around. When he sees her face, she's smiling. Her teeth are bright and white in the lamplight.

"Greetings, Dave. Sollux." Sollux barely notices her send a polite nod his way. He smiles shakily in return, possessed with the excitement of it all, because who knows how many are here if Kanaya is?

But Dave shows his glee the most, surprisingly, as he's the one who leans in quicker than Kanaya can refuse and hugs her tightly. She laughs and strokes the back of his head.

"So you recognised me."

"I can't see right now, Kanaya."

Sollux swallows. However, Kanaya doesn't seem too perturbed.

"You will get used to it."

"Who else is here?" Sollux calls out, and Kanaya looks up at him.

"Not right now. You can see them in the morning. First, you should sleep."

Another flash of a smile. She breaks from the embrace and looks at Dave with both hands on his shoulders, looking hard at him.

"I'm sure you are both exhausted."

With that, she pulls away. Sollux watches her glide out of the room as Dave makes his way back over to the bunk.

"Yes, imother/i," he's heard muttering under his breath.

That night, Sollux doesn't dream of anything.


	18. Chapter 18

Morning comes more slowly than Sollux would have liked. He feels like a child on Christmas morning as he leaps out of his top bunk, leaning in to Dave's bed to gently shake his shoulders in an attempt to wake him.

The enthusiasm diminishes almost completely when Dave won't wake up.

"Dave?" he hisses, gripping onto his bony shoulders harder, leaning in closer, his breaths quickening. "Dave!" Dave still remains unresponsive. Diligently Sollux pulls up one of Dave's sleeves and places his index and middle fingers on his wrist. There's a pulse.

Sollux sinks to his knees, but continues to shake his wrist.

"God. Do you not know how to wake someone, you ass clown?"

Blinking, Sollux looks up, only to close his eyes as he's hit by water spray. There is a thud above him; Dave is sitting up straight as a poker, but slowly lying down again, rubbing his head.

"What the fuck was that for, Captor?"

Sollux throws his hands in the air. "Don't look at me!"

Leaning forward, Sollux peers through the bottom bunk to see to the other side of the bed. A pair of thick-lensed glasses glare back at him. And a scarf. A stupid, stripy, blue and grey scarf.

Oh, wonderful.

"You're welcome," Eridan says thickly, sauntering away into the dark again. Dave and Sollux grumble in harmony, Dave trying to shake as much water out of his hair as he can.

"Of all the merman dickwads that could still be alive, it's iour/i merman dickwad."

Both of them laugh, but Dave stops first, a lost look in his eyes. Sollux understands straight away.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

"You could still have someone. Terezi might still be alive, you never know," Sollux offers weakly. Dave shakes his head, laughing softly.

"I'm sure she is."

Dave pulls out a notepad and pen, and they spend the next three quarters of an hour playing hangman with all of the insults they could direct at Eridan when they all meet. They are interrupted smoothly by another visitor, predictably Kanaya.

"We are all about to have breakfast in the communal room. I assume that you would like to come?"

Sollux leaps up, and Dave nods fervently, and Kanaya chuckles.

"Of course you would."

The communal room consists of a close scattering of tables, all differing in size and shape, with chairs surrounding them. Most chairs are already occupied, but the three of them find a table in the corner and pick their way towards it. Sollux doesn't dare to look at any of the faces in the room. Not yet.

Once they are sat, Kanaya gives them a meaningful stare.

"Not all of us are here."

"I know."

Dave reaches into one of the large pockets of his coat, and withdraws a roughly circular object that Sollux recognises at once. Gently, he pushes it into Kanaya's hands.

A tear glides down her cheek the moment she realises what it is.

"I was hoping she was with you."

"I found her body outside a bunker. She was about to be burned."

Kanaya nods. "May I keep it?"

"Of course."

Giving him another - much smaller - smile, she slips it inside her jacket.

"Any others missing?"

"Well, there's Vriska-"

"Ah."

Dave looks down at his hands, and Kanaya raises we eyebrows at him. From beside him, he picks up the shotgun he's brought. They're all little souvenirs, Sollux realises, maybe as apologies.

"This was hers. It was what killed her," Dave mumbles, holding it horizontal in both hands. Kanaya swallows. "Sorry to be the bearer of bad news."

"She tried to kill us," Sollux blurts, and regrets it straight away. "She shot Dave."

If it's possible for Kanaya's eyebrows to get any higher, then it happens.

"John, too, we think," Dave continues, "is dead. I'm pretty sure he was killed by the crazies or something. Eaten. Nepeta iwas/i crazy, and I had to put her down."

Kanaya twiddles her thumbs. It's hard for all of them to accept, really, that they've lost so many.

"So as far as I know, it's you, me, Captor, and that Ampora douche who was so kind as to give me a wake up call this morning." Kanaya grimaces.

"I am sorry about that."

"No sweat."

"He is probably still upset about-"

She stops, her eyes flickering sadly over to meet Sollux's. He knows what's coming, and readies himself for it. It's him who speaks next.

"Feferi."

"She drowned in one of the floods."

That's kind of ironic. Feferi always loved water. Dave's shoulder bumps against Sollux's, obviously intentionally, as a means of comfort.

"Who else is alive?" Sollux asks.

"Terezi." Sollux can practically hear Dave's smile. "I heard somewhere that Equius died to save Nepeta, but it might not be true. Karkat is here, as is Jade. Eridan, as I'm sure you know." She looks at Sollux. "Aradia."

Something wet and hot wells up in Sollux's chest, and he thinks it might just be achievement. He doesn't hear the rest of Kanaya's list, doesn't even hear the monotonous muttering of the other people in the room, barely even hears his own breathing. He isn't sure if he's crying, and he doesn't really care.

"Can I see her?" he cuts in. Or, at least he thinks he does.

"She is out scavenging right now, with Tavros and Jade."

Sollux nods, slipping back into his ecstatic stupor, lowering his head into his hands and laughing. Dave is laughing, too, after a moment, and their arms are around each other in a way that they never would have been at the beginning of their journey. They laugh until Sollux's diaphragm screams in protest, and even then they just stay with their heads on each other's shoulders.

"Thank you so much," Dave whispers.

Kanaya places a hand on each of their shoulders. "I did not do anything."

After the meeting, Sollux goes back to bed. Sleeping will, hopefully, make the time that he has to wait for Aradia to return much shorter and easier. Dave, he's sure, goes out into the other rooms in search for Terezi.

There's a cackle through the wall. Sollux smiles to himself, making a mental note to go and see her later.

At some point, he drifts off, only to be woken later by a ripple of commotion in the room. And a hand on his shoulder. Sollux scrambles into a sitting position, looking down the far end of the bunk to see that someone's climbed up the ladder and is leaning over to reach them.

Someone with long, thick messy hair and a wide, bright smile.

Sollux feels like crying.

He's felt that way a lot recently.

Holding it in, he leaps forward, embracing her tightly around the waist and burying his face forcefully into her shoulder. Together, they hold each other firmly, and she has her face in his shoulder too and she could be crying but he isn't quite sure. He isn't quite sure if he, himself, is crying.

"Sollux," she chokes after a while. "I knew you'd be okay."

Every last inch of her is still Aradia. Her voice, her appearance, right down to the sound of her soft, overjoyed sobs in his ear. People are looking at them, Sollux knows, but he doesn't care one bit.

The nine that are left are happy.


	19. Chapter 19

It's not like he's needed anymore.

Two more weeks pass in the shelter. Dave knows he hasn't got long left. Supposedly, he always did. Every survivor, really, is suspended in their own little cocoons of being closer to death than ever. And everyone knows it, too, he's sure - no matter how much they choose to deny it. Dave is just a little closer than most. He's half blind and weak and can hardly walk and every breath causes the worst of pain-

But he's done good.

He's gotten them there, hasn't he? He's helped Sollux for the few weeks he had left after he found Rose dead in a smouldering mound of corpses, helped him with his own suffering while bargaining with his own, making a compromise and telling himself that one day he will see Rose again, once his responsibility has gone. They'll be able to talk about the rapture like it's the weather and they'll be able to cross their fingers and wish the best for all the little ant-like assholes that are still alive.

Since they arrived at the new shelter, Dave has kept in the habit of staying awake when Sollux and the other inhabitants are sleeping. Not voluntarily; it's just that he can't sleep, even though he knows he's perfectly safe to. He's used to it by now. Bent double over waning fireplaces, thumbing at the corners of dying pages. And often, in those hours where their consciousness does not overlap he will just sit in the dimness of the room and watch them all, watch the slow, periodical rise and fall of their chests through the dark.

He hopes Rose is proud.

No, he knows Rose is proud.

He's completely certain that she would appreciate how hard he's tried to make things right in the wrongest of times.

One night, he decides he has had enough of waiting for nothing to happen. He has helped Sollux and the others put the younger members of the base to bed, bidding Sollux goodnight - not goodbye, as he had almost done. Sollux may be suspicious of the stumble of his tongue, or even of the finality of the goodnights he gives, but he doesn't say anything about it. The others don't suspect a thing.

At least he doesn't think they did.

They smile in their sleep, he notices, for the first time in an age, (even if they are small and they do flicker and waver) and it's with a smile that Dave continues to watch them.

And then he's alone in the waking world again.

The room is heavy with a damp kind of silence as Dave rummages through one of the bags. He withdraws his hand holding a soiled scrap of paper, and a pen between his index and middle fingers. He isn't sure who it belongs to, but right now, that doesn't matter at all to him. The dead don't worry about misplaced or stolen paper.

He sits back in his chair, taking a deep, rattling breath, and, placing the scrap on his leg, begins to write. His handwriting was scrawled from the shaking of his hands and the fact that he hasn't written anything in months and he has to read it over to check that it's legible.

And when he's finished, he leaves the letter on Sollux's bed, inches from his hand.

Isollux man  
im sorry for starters that im such a douche. but hey we all are so that was kinda redundant tbh  
but  
anyway  
ive done this whole heroic asshole thing and gone away to die. dont act surprised. if you do im gonna cut you from the underworld i do not jest because that would make you so fucking unobservant  
but really though captor  
im sorry that i couldnt  
yknow  
at least say goodbye. that was a dick move  
and yknow why i didnt?haha its because im too much of a coward  
and maybe  
probably  
goodbye wasnt her last word and  
i didnt want it to be mine  
look after yourself captor  
i hope youre happy with your ghost lady or w/e

love dave  
(no homo)/i

And he slips out of the base.

Outside the sun's rising on the barren land and the first breath of air that Dave takes feels like razors on his throat. A step, a breath, another step. He works his way away from the shelter, occasionally stumbling in the dust. The sun on his shoulders is beginning to become unbearable (as it usually is), and without his goggles his eyes are more vulnerable than usual.

And every step still hurts.

But he keeps on walking.

Soon there are trees. They don't seem as twisted as the rest; if anything, they were young, with thin, bruiseable bark and thin branches. There were two of them, and they looked like they were in some kind of embrace.

These trees still held no leaves. And even the sight of new life struck Dave's chest with something blunt and numbingly hopeful.

Unfortunately, they don't cast much of a shadow.

But it's enough. Dave staggers the last few steps and sits beneath them in the few thin, skeletal strips of shade that they provide.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

A kind of blissful agony.

When he reopens his eyes, the world is kind of hazier than before, blurry at the edges, as if he's looking at it through cloudy water, and the sunlight seems brighter, whiter. It's all mixing together, and he has to blink a few times before anything is clear enough for him to focus on.

And when he closes them again he could have sworn he sees someone standing in front of him.

He startles, pressing his back harder against the rubbery tree trunk, but he knows he had nothing to fear. The pain in his chest has lessened slightly and despite his best efforts to move he finds that his muscles are barely responsive and that he can't. He's helpless.

But he doesn't care.

He closes his eyes again, for the last time, and sees a dead person that he actually wants to see. Not any of those metaphorical zombie cannibals.

They hold out their hand. It's milky white and delicate.

"Welcome home, Dave."

He doesn't care if he's hallucinating (which he might be, he knows) but he readily reaches for the hand, grasping at it, falling short a couple of times and eventually falling, his back crashing into the tree again. Tears make ashy cement on his cheeks all too quickly as he realises that she's not real.

Dreading what he might see, he looks ahead again.

Nothing but a hazy-aired plain, the loose sandy topsoil easily tousled in the scorching wind.

Rose is gone. (She was never really there.)

Dave chokes on air and reaches for his chest. It feels like his heart is shattering but he knows, somewhere, that it's just his lungs, still hurting and wanting him dead-

In the early hours of the ashen morning, Dave Strider succumbs.


	20. Chapter 20

Sollux wakes up without really noticing the conspicuous emptiness of the bunk below him. He can't see down there, after all, but he can certainly feel the something that nudges against his hand when he moves it. The edges are thin, sharp, and Sollux would suspect a knife in his lethargic state had it not been as light as-

Paper. It's a piece of paper. Dirty-looking and with worn, tousled fibres that stuck out clearly, but a piece of paper nonetheless. The back of it has the imprints of writing that clearly either exists on the other side or was on the piece of paper before it. Sollux remains lying down for a few more moments, not seeing the note as anything important yet, thumbing absently at the softened, curled edges. He doesn't read it for another hour.

"No homo," he finishes out loud when he does, his voice hushed and very slightly broken, and the woman in the bed across from him must've heard because she gives him the oddest of looks. It would be funny, but not now, given the situation at hand, and how despite everything Sollux feels water collecting in his eyes. But it must seem funny, him hunched over with his fleece bunched around his knees in his bunk, morosely reading out something that seems to stupid. That's Dave Strider for you.

At first, he doesn't feel much at all.

He doesn't even see that as being odd.

Sollux clambers out of his bunk, ignoring the conspicuous flatness of Dave's blankets, and wanders out into the communal room. A few early birds are clustered in the corners, some standing up in preparation to go outside.

Aradia is there, about to leave.

It's slowly that he nears her, and Tavros is the first to notice his gradual approach. He still hasn't let go of the note, and his hand is shaking as he holds it tightly, the corners giving away to his vice-like grip. Tavros nudges Aradia's arm and nods in Sollux's direction, and she turns around, eyes instantly meeting his.

They seem to have been deep in conversation, and Aradia's face wields those little concerned creases in between her eyes.

There is a gas mask under her arm.

"Dave-" Sollux begins, voice small.

"Is gone."

He hadn't expected her to interrupt, and someone shifts behind Tavros. They're not facing their way, but Sollux cranes his neck a little to see Karkat and Terezi sitting, face to face. Karkat looks tired. Really tired, and Terezi looks for all the world like she might have been crying.

Sollux feels stupid. He was nothing to Dave in comparison to these people, and yet he's the one who doesn't have to operate by guesswork and he's the one who has this god awful note. Pity isn't something anyone should be feeling for his loss; there are people here who have had a lot more taken away from them than he has.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He entertains the thought of hiding the note, or burning it, or letting it flutter away in the arid winds of outside so he never has to see it again and so he can spare them all the pain but that seems like a different kind of cruel entirely. Seconds later, the soft, worn paper nudges Aradia's calloused fingers.

Everything afterwards unfolds in slow motion. She reads it, eyes darting quickly from side to side, and the creases subside and her face becomes infested with a blank kind of content.

"It's not me you should be giving this to." Her voice is quieter, kinder.

She passes it to Tavros, who passes it on to Karkat without looking at him. The tired boy seems confused, and glances between the paper and Sollux for a few perplexed moments before tapping Terezi's shoulder twice and mumbling something into her ear. She nods, and they both shuffle into a corner. They're out of earshot, but Sollux can vaguely hear the muttering as Karkat reads it out to her in hushed tones.

By the end, both of them are crying, Terezi in broken, shameless sobs and Karkat in silence, hands tightening around the paper and shoulders shaking.

It's one of those moments where you really feel like you should go.

Aradia bring his attention back to her with a modest clearing of her throat. "We found him."

Even the smallest glimmer of hope that spawns within Sollux at that is extinguished before it can become anything consequential. Dave is dead. Dave is dead, dead, idead/i.

He spins despair like wool.

"How-"

Aradia looks furtively over her shoulder and mutters something incomprehensible, moving over to the other side of the room. Sollux follows like a duckling.

"Not far from here. Half a mile, maybe. The night patrol found him." Night patrol is just a fancy word for ipetty thieves/i. "Dead as a doorstop. Ash exposure, probably. We don't know. We're not a morgue." Sollux almost cuts in with something about the entire world being a morgue. "You know the headband he gave to Kanaya?"

"Rose's. Yeah."

"It was with him. She fell asleep with it in her hands, but it was next to him. There was some hair on the comb of it."

Sollux finds it hard not to find the idea that Dave wore it almost morosely comical. "He put it on?"

"The hair was too long to be his. Soft, too."

Rose's hair.

"It was fresh, Sollux."

Sollux turns violently on his heel and tries to get away, tries to run outside and choke to death just as Dave had because he likes things making sense, thank you very much, and this? None of this makes sense, it's clear as mud, and it scares him, and-

Nails dig into his shoulder.

"Sollux."

"Rose is dead. Rose died weeks ago."

"Sollux, I didn't say it was-"

And it all becomes a little too difficult for him to take in, and he collapses in her arms, dry sobs tearing at his chest and throat and he's sure he's coughing up his lungs and his heart and his ieverything/i because he signed up for survival but he didn't know it would be this hard.

He appreciates that Aradia doesn't push him away.

Within minutes, he's over the worst, and pulls away with red eyes and an aching head. Aradia suggests that he should go back to sleep, but he insists that he should come out with them. More than anything, right now, he needs to be occupied.

An hour later, they leave. Aradia's shoulder rubs against his as they near the ladder that leads up to the exit, and he's sure it was intentional.

The only things that they say are inane, easily-forgotten little mumblings and it really helps Sollux to take his mind off of the limp, deadweight body of his friend (if they ever were friends, in Dave's mind) lying somewhere. He's sure they wouldn't have brought it back to the bunker. That would have meant a whole manner of bad things for the inhabitants; smell, increased chances of infection, general unpleasantness, etc, etc. No one wants a maggoty cadaver in their bunk room.

"Where do you think we go when we die?"

Aradia is looking up, even though there's no sky to see beyond the relentless army of clouds above them. Her voice is muffled, but clear enough.

Now, Sollux isn't really the kind of person who would usually consider something like that. He's stumped, for a while, mumbling as he tries to come up with an answer. When he does, he's almost ashamed of it.

"I like to think that we're reunited with whoever we've lost." He doesn't say it eloquently as she would have.

"Yeah." They're both caught, then, looking up at the sky. Sollux doesn't want to think about that. Things won't end for him, not yet. They'll find a cure for everyone still dying from the ash, they'll blow it away, they'll heal the world, bit by bit.

Sollux is hopeful.

For once.

"Maybe."

* * *

ac;

i'm so sorry for the long wait! but here's the final (?) chapter. i will probably add another couple, though!


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